I'll Tell You A Story
by drosier
Summary: Luna thinks she knows everything about what people keep hidden on the inside, but Pansy knows this is all just a fast-crumbling daydream. // Series of interconnected drabbles taking place from 1992 to 1997. femmeslash PansyxLuna


I wrote this back in November/December for fem_exchange on Livejournal. Thought I'd dump it here even though I'm not too fond of it. I have to admit that I would have never written this pairing otherwise

(Written for hecticity, who wanted mindfuck and dark!romance. Hope I managed.)

* * *

**I'll Tell You A Story**

_1992, September_

"Look at the queer, skinny one," Daphne jeers, a pale, willowy hand delicately pushing past Pansy's nose like a very sure ghost. "She'll be in Hufflepuff."

And so it happens that Pansy Parkinson's first curious glimpse of Luna Lovegood transpires under the long stings of enchanted silver stars etched throughout the ancient stone of the bewitched ceiling. Past the gold plates which had been set by magic, spotless and still lacking the weight of the rich foods which will make up Hogwarts' Welcoming Feast.

Pansy glances lazily from behind black fringe and feigns indifference; it was just a year ago that she similarly pretended to be uninterested in the bewitched ceiling.

It shouldn't have been so difficult, the disinterest; the witch's hair is the color of hay and she ridiculously sways to the Sorting Hat's song, whereas Pansy finds it dull and off-putting. Only if she were honest with herself (and Pansy rarely is these days) she might think her oddly interesting, like a princess in one of the fairy stories her mother used to tell.

Millicent and Daphne gather in close and look to Pansy for a reaction, their laughter ringing through the sorting song like the chiming of tiny, gold bells. (And it's all very well, since they are keeping ties purer than gold.)

"No," Pansy proclaims, smiling wickedly and exposing perfect white teeth for review. The disagreement leaving her lips as she pushes her nose into the air has the first and second-year Slytherin girls bowing anxiously over each other, craving Pansy's commentary more than they hunger for the roast goose or the pumpkin juice or the treacle tart about to be set before them.

(This is why, Pansy thinks, she is something like a dignitary among these girls.)

"I'll bet she's sent home a _squib_," she sneers, though even as the girls snigger too loudly, McGonagall calls the witch Lovegood and the sorting hat calls her a Ravenclaw.

Later, when their bellies are adequately filled―though not _full_--and rows of students file themselves away toward the warm and waiting common rooms, Lovegood's body hits the cold flagstones as Pansy trips her with a prim, buckled shoe on the way into the Entrance Hall.

---

_1993, April_

Pansy discovers the penchant Luna has for telling stories one afternoon as she traipses through the bright and dirty grass of one of the courtyards in Hogwarts. The sky looks like a great, polished-marble countertop, and the dried rosebud with the twisted stem Pansy nicked from the potions classroom is pinned to the front of her robes.

The sun runs its lissome fingers though Luna's hair, spinning it to white-gold, and instead of going out of her way to roughly knock shoulders with Luna (rougher than a lady ought, Mother would remind), Pansy ducks low among dazzling, red roses which haven't yet withered, listening the way Luna tells stories.

Only Luna recites tales not like the ones Mother told, which were made up of bewitched black roses which sprout thorns from a wizard's pores until he breaks apart to writhe painfully to dust and scatter to the wind, a non-being which is forever wanting and incomplete. And then there were the tales of those who presented these roses to their lovers for gold, for power, for self-preservation, or for another.

The moral was clear: _You destroy what you love. In the end._

(Pansy is, after all, a Slytherin, and despite her age, she knows it's only a fool who isn't familiar with her House's reputation.)

Instead Luna tells stories of living fire which dances prettily as it sets the world aflame, calling it reality and becoming so entranced that her eyes seem as large and bright as the moons bobbing through the darkness of the bewitched ceiling above the gold plates in the Great Hall.

There is a bushy-haired, Ravenclaw boy backing away from Luna uncomfortably, and Pansy comes from among the roses (a serpent slithering amongst the garden flowers) to taunt them both.

Pansy laughs as the boy runs off as though the devil were after him, and Luna's voice is no longer dreamy (her eyes are more like crescent than full moons in her indignation) as she delights Pansy with the news that bullies attract something absurdly called a Scraggly Thornmonger.

"Well, I doubt _you'd_ even attract the notice of the Heir of Slytherin, Loony," Pansy snorts. Daphne and Millicent appear at the edge of the courtyard, the castle casting long shadows over their faces; they wait. "No one would dare touch you." Pansy licks her lips and leans in very close to Luna, squinting to discourage the sun from her eyes. "But I wish The Heir would come after you."

When the only reaction she evokes is the information that Luna believes the Heir of Slytherin to be a cover for a dancing troupe of disfigured Mole People, Pansy finds a way to stick Luna with the thorns of the wilted rose pinned to her robes and smiles toward the sunlight, hoping Luna will watch her walk away.

Luna is Pansy's favourite game, everyone knows.

They know because they can see it in a jinx or hear it in words as sharp as a stinging hex. Pansy, though, is the only one who _feels_ it--the pervasive annoyance with Luna's existence, the waxy, indefinite contempt and the knowledge that she has never hated so much.

That is why Millicent and Daphne wait for Pansy to retrieve them at the edge of the courtyard, shadowed in dull stone, raptly looking on as if Pansy is making art.

---

_1994, June_

"Lost your things again, did you?"

Pansy sneers down at Luna's bare, white toes (sporting bright-blue polish and an awful coiled-silver ring, Pansy can't help but notice) before snatching the flier Luna is sticking to the ancient stone walls outside the Great Hall. It showcases Lovegood's lost things scurrying away on long, yarn-thin legs and tucking themselves into shadows as if they were blankets.

"They were taken, actually," Luna replies distractedly, and then, as if she thinks Pansy to be brimming with interest: "Did you know there's a room near the Owlery that fills itself with lost things?" The parchment grasped in Luna's hands rustles against her bright-coloured bracelets as she picks another from the pile and turns to the expanse of stone before her, reaching for the wand tucked ridiculously behind her ear.

Any other witch might take this moment to scurry away in hopes that _Loony Lovegood_ might think her only a wandering apparition, but to Pansy, the snub feels like walking through the white-powder body of the Bloody Baron, and she stays to shiver.

"What's next, Loony?" Pansy asks, looking undeterred, before she lifts her chin superiorly and stamps away in attempt to leave behind the voluminous impression of her displeasure. "Will you be wandering the halls in your knickers soon?"

Later Pansy creeps down the sconce-lined corridors to Ravenclaw tower, the portrait-bound dead looking on with anxious faces, things once lost--though always made of oddness and materials as common as cotton--tucked beneath her arm.

She had nearly wanted to do something silly as smile the time she saw Luna shove an enchanted flier toward Anthony Goldstein, saying to him calmly: "_Don't worry, though. They always find their way back. In the end._"

---

_1995, November_

At lunchtime Pansy walks through the Great Hall, wedged between Daphne and Millicent as if they are all one hard-faced and superior entity (and they are, in a way; bound not only by blood-status, but practice, as their parents remind them so often now) shoving their way toward the Ravenclaw table.

No-one calls Luna beautiful.

There are epithets attached to her, words like 'Loony' which stick like treacle, though among those who have actually looked close enough to really see Luna, there is no-one who would dare call her beautiful. Pansy wonders who could really--or rather, who else could but _Pansy_--with that scraggly hair and those protuberant eyes like sick moons.

(Pansy has a fondness for secrets, and this is her favourite, kept tucked away like something irrevocably tarnished but loath to be chucked out like the cooked animal bones and rotted cheese rinds from the kitchen.)

They aren't really so far from the beginning when Pansy starts to watch Luna with something like hunger, one which cannot be satiated with roasted goose, or steak and kidney pie served on gold plates.

Contempt, it seems, is not so far off from wanting at times. Only Pansy wants it all, sometimes thinking in terms of blood, sometimes thinking about being wrapped inside of Luna in a way which resembles being captured in a thicket of Devil's Snare, stupidly struggling for the bitterness of the air around.

(It's like the time Luna appeared near the Charms classrooms thinking she caught something called a Nargle--which turned out to only be a curly, silver earring---snagged in Pansy's hair, and Pansy used each wine-colored nail to pry Luna's hands open, leaving strawberry-colored marks puckering the skin like tiny kisses. Pansy longed for more strawberry-colored marks to appear on Luna's pallid skin then: bruised, lacerated, and lipsticked.)

So Pansy watches Luna--as she approaches her table and always--eyes piercing her like ivory-handled knives (butcher, not paring), and Luna's soft and sleepy returned glances feel like barbs which itch unbearably beneath her uneasy skin.

A thick, charcoaly line smears itself across the cream-coloured parchment as Pansy snatches it up from under the hands of an intently-scribbling Luna.

No-one calls Pansy beautiful.

She once overheard Parvati telling Lavender that she has a pug-like nose, like that of a dog or another such animal reputed for rolling in filth (rolling with mudbloods and blood-traitors) before Pansy hexed them both.

"What in the name of Merlin is all this, _Loony_?" The charcoaly drawing on the parchment clasped between Pansy's hands looks enchanted, though not by magic the way the ceiling is, and the sounds of Millicent sniggering and Daphne gasping run through Pansy as she steps away from them. (After all, Pansy thinks, even cells split.)

Luna looks to Pansy steadily, her eyes large and defiant, and beyond them there is only stone and Daphne laughing: "I think Loony fancies you, Pansy. Is this why you're always sniffing around like a _dog_, Lovegood?"

For once, it seems Luna has no story to tell, and though something buckles within Pansy, she is able to catch herself (as she always is); looking up from the drawing in her hand, she graces Luna with a dagger-toothed grin.

"Well," Pansy sneers, and amusement spreads under her skin like water, involuntarily shifting her countenance to appear soft and ugly. "We'll have to inform Flitwick that we can't have you in the girls' loos anymore." The parchment caves into a shriveled stone between her hands before Pansy flicks the parchment and _incendio_s it as it curves through the air, a blazing comet crashing onto the table in a withering heap of ash.

"I think you quite like it when people underestimate you," Luna says in a casual, serene tone as Pansy turns to take her leave. "Thinking you're only a foolish, selfish girl who is all thorns. But you're more, Pansy Parkinson. I've watched you."

Pansy can only continue walking, feigning a transient loss-of-hearing which stems from her pride and hoping no-one notices the way her hands shake. Of all the blood-red sunsets over white snow and gold unicorns being petted by lovely witches like the Patil twins, Luna had drawn Pansy. And she had made her beautiful.

---

_1996, February_

The outside world is covered in ice and resembles the resplendent, glass palace that belonged to the witch in the fairy story about the black roses.

The lake offers a strange solace to Pansy, and she imagines it being spring water in the cupped hands of a giant as she traipses through the snow along the edges and swipes tears and discontent from her white face with cherry, frozen fingers.

(_Your Father's Mark grows darker and more painful,_ Mother had written, the beautiful curlicued letters not fit for the horrors they twist out with a flourish. _More than ever it is critical that you keep with our kind._)

A cherry-red knit hat and long hair the colour of hay--certainly not of Pansy's kind at all--seem to appear from the blanket of white like an unruly wild flower, pressing itself against a nearby tree.

"Stalking me now, too, Lovegood?" Pansy snaps, her voice too rough with sorrow and too shaken.

(_After the witch's palace was erected from magic and glass,_ Pansy recalls. _She banished all colour from the land in ironical mourning, turning whosoever dared wear as much as a lily in her hair to dust, just as she had done to her beloved._)

"I thought you might be looking for me," Luna says in a voice like a shrug. Her eyes are reflections of the lake, and the frigid winds colour her cheeks as they brush past.

"Don't be _disgusting_," Pansy barks, but she watches Luna warily. Luna walks forward as if she has lost her way, and nobody has ever been so hard to read. "I'd more likely be looking for dragon's dung than _you_. You think that now because your father's printed one successful article you know everything? You _don't_."

From where she is standing, Pansy can see that Luna's nose is very red where it is tucked into the many-coloured scarves placed around her neck like wispy nooses, but Luna apparently keeps breathing the way Pansy doesn't seem to be able to. Their steps continue to make lazy, muffled noises in the snow until Luna gently backs Pansy up against an icy tree. Pansy sees the snowflake in Luna's eyelashes as the chilly sting pricks its way through the veins in her back like nettles, though she does not cry out.

Only the snow and ice like glass would bear witness anyway, and they do when Luna's final step brings her soft mouth to Pansy's, kissing her rougher than her dreamy demeanor would suggest her capable of.

Pansy feels as if she cannot get enough air, though she also feels she may swell like a balloon and drift away. Her fingers are pained with cold, and when they come into contact with the skin at Luna's neck they feel as if they might break. She hurts with wanting and kisses Luna like it's fighting before really making that transition and beginning to curl her fingers around Luna's throat, hooking a leg around Luna's in attempts to knock her into the snow.

Luna, though, is stronger than Pansy and just as steady, and they tumble painfully together into the hard, packed ice before Pansy is able to reach for her wand.

When Pansy pushes herself from Luna, breathless and heady from all the brightness, she wipes her mouth as if their kisses had been laced with the bitterness of a Dark potion; Luna is still flushed and lying supine among the cold as if she might make an angel.

"You're not as wicked as you like to think," Luna informs Pansy musingly, having the audacity to curve her mouth into a smile. "You can be quite rude to me all you want. I'm not afraid of you."

Luna's calming presence pressed against all the white makes Pansy want to scream, and she stomps off feeling like the broken wax seal which once clinched the scroll issuing a war order.

As soon as she is in the dungeons, Pansy buries her nose and fingers in Draco's hair, which looks white-gold in any light. She clenches her eyelids shut as he undresses her, telling him not to speak when he touches her; even so, he asks why there are light strawberry-coloured bruises sprawling fresh across her ribs and pale hips.

---

_1996, April_

It's a sordid sort of arrangement she has with Lovegood, something which takes place in the mud and grime and required a binding-of-contract forged between their legs; it is that way even with Luna using words such as 'us' and 'good' for what their Blood would call an abomination.

(Pansy's blood must be curdling like milk within her pulsing veins, her grandfathers writhing in posthumous mortification the way Father warned would happen if she merely looked at a blood-traitor.)

Pansy doesn't tell Draco or Queenie or Millicent _or_ Blaise where she really goes those nights she says she is in the prefect's bathroom very late, working off the clingy pains of stress which O.W.L.S and being a prefect as well as part of the Inquisitorial Squad can bring. It's far better anyway―more dignified--for them to imagine her among marble and stained-glass mermaids, rose-scented soap and pastel-coloured suds rather than in the muck she rolls in (like a dog or any other animal reputed for rolling in filth).

And though the heat is so much more than can be borne (even when there is ice outside their walls, hanging like swords from trees and freezing the lungs of the great beasts in the forest) Pansy loves to be burned, loves how real the salty sweat that beads down her back into fingernail-sized gashes feels. The pain is raw and sharp like a knife's edge, and so is the ecstasy, so much that if she would think about it, she would realize the two were twined together much like crawling vines.

Mother had once said--as she tucked a brimful vial of dark, rancid blood and charred bone behind her grandfather's portrait and put a gloved finger to lipsticked lips--that every witch was entitled to at least one great secret.

This must hold at least a vestige of truth, Pansy thinks, because even Luna Lovegood can horde secrets: she never informs Pansy of where she leaves to once every week on what seem the most frigid and darkest nights. Though Pansy does like it when Luna forewarns of her absence, albeit only because then Pansy can retort with a scratchy certainty clinging to her throat that she couldn't care less what Luna does.

It is, after all, Luna who backs Pansy into the darkened and dingy doorway by the Owlery for the first time, muttering something about chance and _goodness_ when it is too cold and all Pansy can think is that she has never thought Luna one for gambling.

After that, Pansy purposely loses count of the number of times she has had Luna tangled up with her like Devil's Snare (stupidly gasping for the bitterness of the air around), though Luna will still tick it off, chapped lips against Pansy's neck heralding those damning numbers.

(Still, Luna does do well to keep their dirty secret too, and Pansy doesn't ask Luna for her reasons, only thinks it is because Luna knows they are only trying their hands at fooling themselves for a bit, just as the rest of the world does.)

Even so, those tawny, once-used butterbeer corks around Lovegood's neck twine together with Pansy's white-gold and rubies as they lay together like animals, and it's the difference between the richness of champagne and the cheap sting of firewhisky, but Pansy can't stop.

Over and over, on and on, it pulls and fuses them together like solder, and when Pansy stumbles into the Slytherin common room late in the night, rumpled and flushed from fucking, Draco sneers out mordant remarks about how curious it is that the baths make Pansy stink of sex and filth.

---

_1996, July_

There is a framed photograph of Luna (young and lovely and _clean_) with her mother that sits atop the snow-white nightstand at Luna's bedside. Her carpet is the exact colour of the blazing sky outside, though for someone reputed as being so off kilter, Luna's room seems to give off only normalcy and teenagedness wound carefully with the distinct smells of fresh paints and turpentine; the gadgets below are the strange ones, reclining among homespun, wildly-painted walls where they can be shared.

Pansy's head hits Luna's canary-yellow pillow as she listens to the bombast and the threats which leave Father and drift up the winding staircase like clattering feet. He stands a flight down, lofty and incongruous among the Lovegoods' curved walls, and speaks to Luna's father of debt, debt that Luna is unaware will be passed to herself and Pansy as long as the Parkinsons remain without the blessing of a son.

(Xenophilius keeps secrets too, it seems, and they breed like shadowed things in the night, condemning his own Blood as she listens intently to his stories.)

"Pity you're not as beautiful as your mother was," Pansy says when she hears Luna reach the top of the spiraling staircase, which twists like a great, iron serpent. Pansy's robes are rucked indecently high up at her thighs, pointed shoes pressing muck and impurities into Luna's quilt where she slothfully lays.

"I think I quite take after dad," Luna says serenely, fingers running over the painted frame by the bed, though Pansy's eyes never leave the ceiling. "I see your father's considering share in _The Quibbler_," Luna continues hopefully, like it isn't a ridiculous front, and Pansy merely allows a bored 'hmm' to sit at her throat before the nearness of Luna permeates her fully and Pansy has to reach out and take hold the bony hand running over the frame.

"They'll be a while," Pansy affirms, tearing her eyes from the ceiling to look at Luna. There is soot laying across her red cheeks like an earthy rouge, her hair mussed the way it usually is when Pansy watches her dress, and if Luna was ever confused to walk upstairs to find Pansy in her bed, it does not show.

The bed dips in lower, creaking like a very large mouse as Luna's knee pierces the edge, and Pansy holds on tighter, pulls harder.

"You painted that," Pansy says as she points upward, because she cannot seem to bring herself to express anything else without risking it coming off as relief or caring or affection. It wasn't so long ago that Pansy thought Luna dead, a tale tied off so neatly to the one of Draco's father being carted off to Azkaban.

Instead she focuses on the idiotically-grinning faces of people she loathes painted vividly over Luna's ceiling, the word 'friends' running a hundred times through in the purity and sureness of gold. They are all painted to be beautiful, too, looking down on them with something which makes them glow.

Luna is too skinny and dirty, but Pansy shoves her hand between her legs, kissing curved places at her neck like she is delicately storing more secrets. She thinks of emotional debt and of a paintbrush, one once gripped by the hand Pansy holds in her own, dancing dexterously over the arch of smiling lips painted over the ceiling, and suddenly Pansy is too rough, and the bones in Luna's fingers are shattering beneath Pansy's hand like a fragile, winged creature.

When Luna cries out, Pansy does not know whether it is in pleasure or pain.

---

_1997, May_

"We're not friends, Lovegood." Pansy's breath is coming fast, sharp peaks which measure where she has been. This is the top. "You're a good fuck."

(She's the best, even though Pansy thinks she and Luna are meant for different things. Luna is a societally-declared nutjob and the most delusional fancier of daydreams and fairy tales, pathetically trying to superimpose those fancies onto reality. But Luna is oddly wise and draws Pansy in like fire, and Pansy cannot stop herself from getting burned up in her goodness, though she sometimes wonders if one can become a nutjob by association.)

Pansy's face is buried in the soft stretch of pale skin by the sharp of Luna's hipbone, fingertips curling into the bedclothes (cotton, not silk) as she makes her way up Luna's body, impressing strawberry-coloured marks like tiny engravings in curvatures along the way. Pansy hears a sharp intake of breath and hopes that Luna doesn't see her for what she is--hopes that the charcoal-and-parchment face is somehow preserved in her mind's eye.

Luna does, after all, still believe the stories her father tells; why should it be so different with Pansy?

"We all do what we have to," Pansy pants like it means anything, hoping to distract from the swell of unwelcome vulnerability culminating to the surface of her skin like sweat. "To get by."

Luna's hands are wound in Pansy's hair, but she isn't looking for Nargles this time; instead Luna kisses the space behind Pansy's ear and at her jawline and under her ribs and the insides of her thighs.

Pansy will always hold herself up, even when Luna does things to deliberately make Pansy's knees buckle, breathing, "I'll catch you;" saying once that looking into Pansy's eyes can sometimes be like looking into mirrors; and always repeating: "I believe in you, Pansy Parkinson. You'll come around."

She won't, though: Pansy has always been a bitter child, and she distributes acerbity and blame as if from a deck of playing cards.

Luna thinks she knows everything about what people keep hidden on the inside, but Pansy knows this is all a fast-crumbling daydream; though for now, under crisp, white sheets like morning, they sleepwalk through sunrise after sunrise.

---

_1997, December_

Luna's eyes are clenched shut in the impenetrable fancy of a daydream, though Pansy thinks she may finally exist too far up among the ill-boding night for Luna to be able to see her anyway.

("There is always more than one side to every story," Luna had once informed Pansy conversationally, cupping Pansy's cheeks in her willowy hands and kissing Pansy's cold nose, saying it was as red as a rosebud. Pansy would dare her to explain those things now, _beg her to_, if only Luna were capable of doing much more than scream.)

_"Crucio."_

Luna writhes over the place where goblets were once set out in impatient waiting to touch the lips of witches and wizards like the founders, and Pansy cannot feign even the slightest sliver of disinterest tonight: she marvels at the stoniness of her own voice pushing past her throat with the sharpness of thorns.

The horned, war-fed creatures stampede and beat their battle-drums far out beyond the castle, though the mania still touches Hogwarts, sucks them all up to work them like a machine. Things as wonderful and lavish as feasts served upon scattered, gold plates like constellations are brashly put aside in favour of the long tables in the Great Hall being made to form mahogany barriers against the stone walls, and suddenly it became not a place for feasting, but a place for watching nightmares unfurl like a blooming rush of black roses.

_"Crucio."_

Pansy watches Luna's cloudy eyes roll back into her pretty head in what decidedly is not ecstasy, her body twisting at grotesque angles over the flagstone. Pansy thinks she feels it too―by way of some empathetic tunnel forging itself though the potent strains of Dark Magic. Through that which is Unforgivable.

Though somehow she realises her bones should be splintering open with a more horrible sense of pain, piercing the soul and painting more bruises--the ugly, bloodied ones from too much ice and cold--on the raw insides of muscle and skin. Only numbness sprawls itself through Pansy quicker than plague, and she thinks she can say now with certainty that she knows the frigid, bereft nothingness of being a ghost.

Even the heads of the most noble Gryffindors are not impervious to this desperation, and Pansy did only what she had to, no matter the cost; only now something as preposterous as meaning--as _understanding_--crashes forefront into her brain like a shattered mirror.

The stars scurry from the dark puckers in the blackish ceiling like inverted kisses--a segue into a nightmare―and then Pansy can recall her mother's stories neatly kneaded away into the past, stories decorated prettily with roses and thorns and a glass palace draped all in black.

Another swish and flick of the wrist, and Pansy throws her head back to laugh and laugh like it's a shriek, because she realises now that she loves her.


End file.
